Zenith City: Stories from Duluth

School Days

twenty-five years ago Robert Fulghum’s book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten hit the best-seller lists and stayed there for two years. You may recall his lessons: honesty, sharing, showing kindness, cleaning up after yourself, balancing work, play, and learning, among others. I wonder if that book could have been written, or if its conceit would have taken a vastly different direction, had Fulghum attended kindergarten with my lifelong chum Ralph Golberg. About three weeks into the  school year, our family moved from Regent Street in Duluth’s east end to a house next door to my grandmother’s on Tenth Avenue East in the Central Hillside neighborhood . I transferred from Lakeside Elementary to U. S. Grant after the move and was immediately aware of Ralph. He was continually reprimanded for various infractions—talking , poking another child, standing when he was supposed to be sitting, or sitting when ordered to stand. He perpetually got up the nose of Miss Geddes, our elderly teacher. One morning there was an all-school assembly in the gymnasium , across the hall from the kindergarten classroom. The program was an appeal to children’s patriotism during World War II, and we were urged to save our pennies and nickels and dimes to buy war savings stamps. Following the presentation, Mr. Anderson, the principal, dismissed pupils back to their classrooms. Leaving the gym, I was positioned near Ralph, who spied Mr. Anderson, a tall bald man with a fringe of white hair, motioning children to move along and not make noise as they returned to class. As Mr. Anderson moved farther down the hall, Ralph piped, “Hey, Baldy,” which made me giggle, and I repeated his “Hey, Baldy” 18 school days School Days | 19 myself, only to feel the dry fingers of Miss Geddes clamped on the nape of my neck. She had Ralph’s neck in her other hand and hastily marched the two of us back into our room, where in front of the entire class she upbraided us for our “rude, very bad behavior.” While Ralph was nonplussed, I was terrified and near tears. Finally Miss Geddes said, “You boys go up to Mr. Anderson’s office right this minute and tell him what you did. You will tell him you are very, very sorry.” She led us to the door and ushered us into the hall. I immediately started for the stairs leading to the principal’s second- floor office. I had begun to cry, fearing retribution from the principal and certain my parents would be notified of my transgression. Ralph sauntered toward the drinking fountain, pausing to glance at me. “Where are you going?” “Teacher said we—we have to go to the office.” I turned and started back up the stairs. “We’re not going,” Ralph said, his voice firm, insistent. I panicked. “What will we do?” Calmly and confidently he replied, “We’ll walk around in the hall for a few minutes and go back in.” “Yeah, but what if she—?” I choked on a frightened sob. “If she asks what we said, we’ll tell her we told him we were sorry. And,” he added emphatically, “if she asks us what he said, we’ll say he told us to never do that again.” He leaned over the fountain and drank. Still terrified, both of Miss Geddes and of Ralph’s boldness, I walked around the hall with him for several minutes. Ralph, however , retained his nonchalance, pausing to look at pupils’ artwork posted in the hallways, chuckling at some pieces and making derisive comments about others. Finally we returned to our room, and precisely as five-year-old Ralph predicted, Miss Geddes asked us what transpired. “We told him we were sorry,” Ralph said. “And what did Mr. Anderson say?” “He told us never to do it again.” “Very well,” said Miss Geddes. “See to it that you don’t. I hope you’ve learned your lesson here. Now quietly take your places in the circle.” 20 | School Days What I learned from Ralph that morning was that some children had moxie even at a tender age, and while the values espoused by Robert Fulghum endure, in some circumstances they can be trumped by chutzpah. near the end of summer in , I was graduating from the University of Minnesota–Duluth...